


Strawberry Swing

by shenyun5000



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Established Relationship, Executive Dysfunction, F/M, He just dies and everyone sings Seasons of Love from RENT like it's Glee, Illustrations, Like in a very American high school drama show way, Mentions of the Blue Lions + Glenn, Post-Canon, Sorry About These Tags, Subaru Outback, Sylvain Booty Jams, The Catharsis That Comes From Cleaning Your Car, Vague Glenn Death, mixtapes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:40:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25044781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shenyun5000/pseuds/shenyun5000
Summary: “Nobody listens to CDs anymore.” She gives him the courtesy of taking them out of her trash pile. “Except for you, maybe. You’re a freak who watches movies on LaserDisc.”Ingrid cleans her car for the first time in a very long while. Sylvain tries to help and makes some interesting finds along the way.
Relationships: Ingrid Brandl Galatea/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 39
Kudos: 126





	1. Strawberry Swing

**Author's Note:**

> "Strawberry Swing" is this incredibly romantic, idealistic 2008 Coldplay song about sharing a fond, vivid memory with someone you love.

“You promise not to laugh, right?”

“I’m not going to laugh.”

“I’m being serious right now. I don’t want to hear you saying anything I already know. It’s really bad.”

“I promise. That’s a _Gautier Guarantee_. Absolutely airtight.”

“Ugh.”

Ingrid’s car sits in the driveway. It’s a Subaru Outback from Imperial Year 2004; its dualtone sea-mist green and pearly beige exterior is so fringed and damaged by the sun that the colors are near-unidentifiable in its state of desaturation. What was once assuredly a beautiful and reliable 165 horsepower vehicle during its prime has now been reduced to a mere shadow of its former self, choking and sputtering at the turn of the ignition and continuing to rattle as it braves the journey to the grocery store across town.

But this is her steed. It is her rock, her constant. It is her freedom. Without it, she’d miss the motion of stretching across empty backroads, searching for someplace to be that’s anywhere but home. Such a sensation remains so sacred to her: rolling down the window to let the wind brush her hair against her aviator shades and push against the arm she leaves out to dangle in the heat. She’d let her other hand drift from the steering wheel over to the radio to put a song on repeat. She could close her eyes for a safe second and imagine she is flying far away, up and over the windswept fields of Galatea grain.

She keeps moments like those close to the chest; it is a joy to be experienced only in the presence of herself and herself alone. She holds an old car so hallowed, watching the odometer tick up and counting down the years she thinks it has left in its lifespan like it’s a family dog.

If only it were so easy to take care of on a basic hygienic level as it is to merely cherish.

“Where do we start?” Sylvain asks, flapping a garbage bag open like he’s setting a sheet out to dry.

“We’re already here at the front.” Ingrid steps to the driver’s seat door, pulling the handle to let it swing open. “I think this would need to be cleared before anywhere else.”

She eyes the enemy: an ever-growing heap of trash that floods her car, extending its tendrils over each seat and leaving no single square inch of the floor visible at all. Save for the stray chip or french fry here and there, the mess manifests itself into patterns of emptiness. Empty paper bags. Empty plastic bags. Empty bottles. Empty cups, melted ice already spilled on the nearest surface it could find. Scattered stacks of unused napkins. Receipts from various stores spread across the mass like streamers, none of them for purchases meant to be returned.

“You got it, Chief. I’ll let you know if I find anything good.”

Ingrid can’t even bring herself to roll her eyes. What comes out is just a weary squint.

“Oh, like this.” Sylvain quickly shovels out a stack of paper bags to get to a piece of treasure hidden underneath: a crumpled cardboard crown. He holds it out and waves it from the passenger’s side of the car.

“Nope. Bag it.” Ingrid barely had to look at it. She knows its story. Felix celebrated his 24th birthday at Chuck E. Cheese’s just a few months ago. In pure Felix-spirit, the birthday boy took full advantage of the alcohol menu and proceeded to cause problems all night. He slipped on a skee-ball and sustained an injury that had to be remedied with several stitches to the face. The emergency room was filled with hazy adults wearing colorful paper crowns that night.

“Ah, that’s fine. I’ve still got mine.” Sylvain tosses it in the garbage bag before he can let his growing desire to wear it kick in.

He kept a stupid paper crown from a birthday that wasn’t even his. How charmingly sweet. The thought that the both of them share such sentimentality together enters the revolving door of Ingrid’s limbic brain. For someone so readily available to run away from his hometown and everything he’s known, Sylvain grasps for a sense of material familiarity quite often. He keeps the coffee table littered with his favorite childhood board games. The hallway walls are lined with all sorts of photographs and artwork from his friends, near and distant. He’s kept his towels and bedsheets the same colors for as long as he’s been alive. It all keeps him grounded. The method to his organization and lack of real litter brings about a notion of utility to how he cherishes his own memories.

He’s soft. It’s a strange, lovely thought. A warmth fills Ingrid’s body.

“Hey, let’s take a look at your receipts!” He shouts from across the car.

The warmth immediately subsides.

“Oh, no. Please throw those away,” Ingrid claws across the seats to snatch the receipts from his hands but he strategically steps out of the car and into the sunlight.

“Looks like… last year you went to Target to buy peanut butter and a tomato. That’s it.”

“Fuck off.”

“Did you eat them together?”

“No.”

“In the car?”

“Absolutely not.”

“If I dig under the seat am I going to find an empty jar of peanut butter?”

He might be right. It’s likely. She answers by forcefully sighing and tuning him out.

  
  


x

  
  


“No, don’t you dare get rid of those.”

“What now?”

“C’mon, I saw that.”

They’ve developed a rhythm to their garbage collection, easy enough since there’s little variety for them to actually sort through. Fast food debris gets crumpled and tossed. Sylvain finds a receipt to marvel at. Bottles get bagged. Ingrid bags a receipt before Sylvain gets the chance to read through it. It’s a cycle that continues to fill two garbage bags in relatively little time. There’s no signs of slowing down until they’ve nearly cleared the front seat floors and Ingrid decides to covertly add some old discs amongst her collection of rubbish.

“Nobody listens to CDs anymore.” She gives him the courtesy of taking them out of her trash pile. “Except for you, maybe. You’re a freak who watches movies on LaserDisc.”

“Look at the labels.” Sylvain pleads with his eyes.

Ingrid flips the discs over. Her jaw drops and Sylvain’s face lights up like a jumbotron.

“ _Now That’s What I Call Ingrid! Volume 32_ ,” she reads it aloud. The front of the CD’s matte finish is meticulously scrawled on with a bold Sharpie. Each letter arcs and follows the curvature of the disc’s surface. The spaces in between are filled with scattered little stars.

The memories trickle in. A spring breeze whistles through the student parking lot. Volleyball practice lasted way too long and the distant clamor of the campus life has quelled to the sounds of the occasional fading footstep. In the quiet chamber of her car she turns the key but doesn’t start the ignition. She slips Sylvain’s newest gift into the radio from its plastic jewel case. He caught her during lunch earlier that day, eager to share about how many hours he spent the other night curating his iTunes catalogue to make sure that this playlist would be perfect the moment before he burns it. She always honors his effort. On the drive home, she doesn’t skip a single track. Each one is her favorite.

“Yeah no, those aren’t going away,” Sylvain rushes to the bottom of the seats. “Are the cases somewhere down here or did you toss ‘em out?”

“I honestly don’t know.” She rubs the reflective surface of the disc with the edge of her shirt, inspecting for damages beyond fingerprint smudges. It’s just a few nicks and scratches, nothing major. She was expecting worse for something that’s probably been stepped on more than once. “I always had them playing. I needed to keep them all out so I could switch them out quickly while driving.”

Sylvain freezes in his tracks. His lips tighten up into a smile.

“Really?” His face flushes. He could melt into a puddle right then and there.

He’s made a bunch of these mixtapes. He’d still be at it if disk drives weren’t phased out of modern laptops. There’s no passion in dragging and dropping a song into a Spotify folder. There was blood, sweat, and tears to his art. It's vulnerability just as it is a practice of vanity. The message had to be mindful. Heartfelts and honesty were his fool-proof way of worming into the heart of any girl.

For a moment, he feels four walls closing in on him. His lap is warmed by the whirr of an old Macbook. He plays back his latest masterpiece, turning up the volume on his headphones. It drowns out the noise of Miklan’s footsteps against the hardwood.

“I listened to each one back and forth.” Ingrid’s voice snaps him back to his reality. She watches him jitter in excitement. “I never really bought albums because you just kept making these for me.”

“This is the greatest thing I have ever heard in my life.”

“They made for good company during long drives.” She flips to the next disc and looks it over. “Even this one, whatever this was.”

It reads “ _SORRY_ ”, accompanied by a single drawing of a heart. There might have been a backstory to this one. There might have actually been several. Sylvain has always had a lot to apologize for anyways. He frisbee-tossed this one onto the roof outside her bedroom window one summer night and prayed that they wouldn’t have to talk about it when the next day came and that her dad didn’t just hear the sound of a jewel case striking the window.

“You listened to my apology tape?”

“Yeah.”

“More than once?”

“They’re good songs, Sylvain.”

“Actually, you can toss that one. Fine by me.”

“Is it just as embarrassing as this one?” She shows him the third disc in the stack. Written neatly on the surface without any flair or flourish are the words “ _I like you but I’m not good with words_ ”. She’s grinning as she holds it up.

It’s true. Ingrid was someone he couldn’t win over with a pickup line and a single night of extraordinary physical pleasure. There was a time long after their post-college homecoming when he could only be speechless, skirting around her and dodging her presence left and right when he realized he was in love with her. He couldn’t risk running his mouth but he had to tell her his truth. The best way he could was by communicating in a language of love shared by the both of them.

If it didn’t work they wouldn’t be here years later, sharing a mattress on the floor in a duplex miles away from their hometown. Funny how life works out sometimes.

“Oh, fuck.” Sylvain lets a smile spread across his face, unsure of what specific emotion has caused him to do so.

“Do you want to toss this too?”

“No. I don’t think so. It wouldn’t feel right.”

“So what do we do?”

“Bring it in the house. We’ll use it as a drink coaster so we can stop Felix from water-staining that coffee table you like so much.”

“ _Sylvain_.” If they weren’t conveniently separated by the width of a Subaru, there’s a reasonable chance Ingrid would be at his throat right now. She knows damn well he stains that table too.

“I’m joking, of course. We can do something special for this one. I’ll frame it and put it above the threshold in as a nice reminder of how we got here.”

She smiles.

“That’s not bad at all. It’s probably better staying in the house than sitting here.”

“And on the off-chance that we ever break up, we can tear it down and let one of us ceremoniously smash it into sharp bits.”

“Don’t even joke about that.”

Sylvain expects Ingrid to break his gaze but she gives him a smile. He returns it.

  
  


x

  
  


They’ve filled in four bags of trash already, now reaching five once they conquer this last quarter of Ingrid’s backseat. The car’s rear had made for a much more interesting excavation than the back. Fast food bags, bottles, and other recyclables still made up most of the mountain but hidden underneath were more treasures waiting to be found. Tucked away under a seat was a pair of designer basketball shoes that Ingrid was excited to try on (Sylvain was equally as enthusiastic to let them turn a profit with an internet sneakerhead instead). Finding a yoga mat on the floor dredged up a nice memory of attending one pilates class with Mercedes and Annette and immediately quitting once the latter rolled her ankle during the first session. Next to it was a nine-iron wrapped in rope used to retrieve Ashe’s phone from a storm gutter one un-fateful day. They even found one of Dimitri’s missing wallets somewhere amongst the mess, lost and immediately replaced a very long time ago just as his others until Dedue introduced him to the concept of the functional and ever-stylish wallet chain.

There’s one more artifact that they have yet to find, wedged deep into the seats and only noting its presence with a faint glimmer.

“Ohp, Ingrid.” Sylvain reaches for it. “There’s a straggler.”

He pulls out a disc, just as worn and stained as the others thus far. The title written on the matte surface reads “ _Hey Ingrid, I know you’re going through some shit so I made you this. I’ll give you some space but feel free to give this a listen if you ever feel lonely_ ”. Bordering the text is an illustration of a pair of feathered wings.

“Welcome to your tape, babe,” he says as he holds it out for her to read.

Yep. She knows damn well it’s her tape.

Flowers tributes pooled at Glenn’s locker for months long after his untimely passing. Something about the sight proved to be horrid in Ingrid’s eyes just as it was touching and beautiful. These shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t have happened. They shouldn’t be ending half of high school with a body count.

Somebody had to be their rock back then. Sylvain has always had a sure-fire way of keeping it together when the group really needed him to. There’s a significant chance nobody else would have survived to the end of that semester if it weren't for his efforts. He faithfully waited for an AIM or email exchange with Felix every night. He made sure Dimitri never slept without a roof over his head. He never left Dedue to clean up what was left all alone.

The day Ingrid returned to school, Sylvain waited for her at the gates. She stumbled forward and fell into what she remembers firmly as the warmest, most earnest hug she has ever had the honor of returning. There wasn’t a conversation. He slipped the jewel case into her bag and told her everything was going to be okay.

She listened to this CD on the way home that day. She listened to it alone in her bedroom with her headphones turned all the way up whenever she felt like falling apart. She had it playing the day she moved out for good, watching her father’s old house disappear in the rear-view mirror as she drove away.

It doesn’t deserve a burial here.

“Let’s take that one in too,” she tells him. “I might need it again one of these days.”

“Got it.”

  
  


x

  
  


They’ve filled in their last bag of trash. They leave the doors open, letting the disinfectant spray settle before taking a breather in the seats up front.

“See, that wasn’t so bad.” Sylvain reclines the passenger seat. “I told you it wasn’t going to take the entire day.”

“That’s what bothered me the most.” Ingrid hangs her head low, staring at the pedals on the floor. “I already knew it was never going to take that long to fix.”

“Aw, babe.” He watches as she leans back and reclines the driver’s seat to around his level.

“I’ve been avoiding this for so long. I could have been pulling the trash out every time I got home but I did nothing about it and let it all sit here for no reason.”

“Maybe there was a reason, or maybe there doesn’t need to be one.” He turns to his side to face her. “What I’m not going to have you do is blame yourself for something that’s already been fixed. You won. You fixed it.”

“ _We_ fixed it. I took time out of your day s--”

“No, you did not. Time’s not wasted if I’m with you.”

Stupid, sexy Sylvain and his stupid, sexy one-liners. It just might be enough to leave Ingrid some peace of mind.

She reaches for his hand.

“Thank you, then. I couldn’t have done this without you.”

He wraps his fingers around hers.

“I don’t know about you but I don’t feel like taking the trash bags out and going back inside just yet.”

“You really want to stay here in my car? Of all places?”

“Please tell me you’re kinda tired too.”

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

Sylvain hands her the “ _Hey Ingrid_ ” disc. She turns the key in the ignition just slightly enough to turn on the radio, slipping it in.

_Strawberry Swing_.

She’s listened to track one countless times over the past decade but something in her mind insists that this is the best it has ever sounded.


	2. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is an illustrated epilogue. [If you have problems viewing the images below or if they're not loading in right because I have no idea what I am doing, please click here to see a Twitter post that contains everything you need to see.](https://twitter.com/shenyun5000/status/1279300560441577472)

_[A few years down the road.]_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't plan to do this (like I just made this right now, I didn't plan for an epilogue at all!) but I thought I'd at least have the courtesy of uploading here it so it's accessible to the AO3 crowd. I set all the images to display at a width of 700px so... uh, hopefully that's enough. I have no idea if that's gonna work on mobile so I'm linking the Twitter post in the chapter summary so you can see the illustrations at a higher-res.
> 
> Cheers, and thank you for all the kind comments so far! I'll be getting around to responding to the lot of you soon.
> 
> Find me in the drift at @shenyun5000 on Twitter.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, and thank you to [Ashley](https://twitter.com/eudemonic) for reading this before anyone else to put up with my nonstop shit!
> 
> Once again, I'm a relative stranger to writing fic but I had this idea that I was too exhausted to explore via drawing a comic like I usually do. Thank you to my readers for constantly putting up with that!
> 
> There's an official Spotify playlist for this AU that you can check out by clicking [right here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0VUAgiYIgIVyw0eVZEYqXk?si=yzVgOHPASuqtSyCXk9K-2A)! If I was careful enough, you should see that these are tracks from 2008 and below, which was the exact vibe I was trying to accomplish.


End file.
